


The Dagger and The Hammer

by BewareTheIdes15



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Growing Up Together, M/M, Possessive Behavior, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-28
Updated: 2018-04-11
Packaged: 2019-02-07 19:25:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12847893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BewareTheIdes15/pseuds/BewareTheIdes15
Summary: The truth is, Loki is the only secret Thor has ever managed to keep.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> For stuffimgoingtohellfor, ark, and reserve who are very good friends and very bad influences. Thank you for joining me in Thorki hell and enabling my tendency to spend way too much time talking about Loki's outfits. 
> 
> A note on the underage: there is a kiss that takes place when Thor and Loki are whatever passes for Asgardian "child-age" but everything from there on is played kind of hand-wavy on the age front (immortals, how do you even?) so feel free to view them as suits your tastes and squicks.

Thor doesn't remember when Loki became his brother. He would have been barely more than an infant himself, crawling around courtiers' feet and teething at the arms of his father's throne.

He doesn't recall a squalling, dark-haired little thing being placed in his cradle, or teaching Loki to walk almost as soon as he learned the trick himself. 

He doesn't remember crying when he and Loki were first moved to separate bed chambers, or Loki finding his way into Thor's bed in the middle of the night anyway, to the bafflement of all of the nursemaids. 

What he does remember - although he can't be certain if it's his own proper memory or some conjuring of his mind from the dozens of times his mother told him the story when he and Loki were quarrelsome - is that from the very start, and for years after he was clever enough to form the word "brother," he referred to Loki only as, "mine."

***

“It’s like Ymir,” Loki grunts as he hoists himself up onto the branch at Thor’s side. They’re almost of a height now, even though Loki is younger, but Thor has always been a superior climber. “There’s power in the first of things.”

“Father slew Ymir,” Thor points out, snagging his fingers around Loki’s chubby wrist, just to be safe. Mother says that Loki’s strength is of a different kind than Thor’s. She doesn’t say that that makes it Thor’s duty to look after him, but Thor understands anyway. 

“And made Midgard of his body.” Loki lifts his chin in victory, grin showing the two missing teeth that slur the edges of his words. Thor’s never lost any teeth, but the Allfather says that they will grow back again; that it is the normal way of some children. He’s never actually known anyone else who lost teeth either, but there must surely be others like Loki. His father wouldn’t lie. 

“No one is going to-“ The words halt in his throat at the giggling rustle of Freyja and Gefjun running up to the base of the tree below. The two of them circle around it, peering around the sides like sniffing hounds before making off again. He starts again in a low whisper. “No one is going to make Midgard of a kiss.”

The foliage blocks most of the breeze, and without it the air around them feels humid and close, the sticky-sweet scent of apples and grass like a film on the roof of Thor’s mouth. Beneath his fingers, Loki’s skin is cool, damp with the sweat from Thor’s palm and gritty from tree bark. 

Loki rolls his eyes, a swirl of blue-green-black in the patchwork shade. “It leaves a mark, a seidr And seidr is a force of its own. It might change the whole path of your life! You could be choosing who you’ll belong to forever with one touch of your lips.”

Thor’s stomach clenches like a fist. His knowledge of magic is meager, but Mother teaches Loki about such things, and he is all the time holed away in the library reading on them. The scholars say that he is fiendishly talented with all sorts of sorcery, destined to be one of the finest in all of the nine realms. If anyone would know the truth of it, it’s Loki. 

“I don’t want to belong to anybody.”

One broad leaf comes free between Loki’s fingers, dancing on the air above his outstretched hand, tiny whispers of green magic skating along its edges. “Father belongs to Mother, Mother belongs to Father. You are a prince, you have to marry. There is no choice in the matter.”

“Except in who I kiss.”

“Well, yes, that.” Loki shrugs. The leaf flitters away, catching on the wind as it falls. Loki’s eyes follow it until it disappears. "But you’ve seen how they are. Mad for it. Someone will kiss you eventually, it cannot be helped.”

“But if I kissed someone first, then I could choose who,” insists Thor.

“That is true,” Loki muses, "Who would trust with such a matter, though? Who would have the strength to control this sort of power?”

With a small curving motion of Loki’s fingers, the leaf reappears, hovering once more over the flat of his palm.

“Loki!”

Lit with the faint glow of power pulsing through the leaf’s veins, Loki’s eyes are emerald limned. “Yes, brother?”

Thor’s pulse kicks too, thrumming with his own brilliance. 

“I could kiss  _ you _ ! Your magic could keep the power safe, and then I’d have your kiss as well to protect!”

The smile that slinks across Loki’s mouth catches eerily in the light, shadows twisting into the edges of it before Loki snaps his fist closed around the leaf and all of the glow drains away. 

“That is a cunning plan, Thor.”

Mead-heady, a warm, tingling rush floods under Thor’s skin; their tutors are always going on about Loki’s wit, but Loki, at least, can appreciate Thor’s cleverness.

“It is,” he preens.

The space between them is already short, Loki’s bony knees pressed right up against Thor’s, so he hardly has to lean in at all to press how mouth up against the pale bow of Loki’s. In truth, Thor had expected it to feel… more somehow. More potent, perhaps, considering how much power Loki said it had. The reality of it is hardly any different from kissing Loki’s cheek before bed, soft and pleasantly cool in the way Loki’s body forever seems to be.

“Was that it?” he asks, pulling back. At a stretch he might say Loki’s face has a little more color, but besides that he can’t tell any difference at all. 

Loki presses his lips together, the dull pink line of them disappearing briefly between his teeth before he frees them again. 

“You should…” Loki’s fingers knead against the bark of the branch, the tiny piece coming free under his fingers leaving a smooth, bald spot between them. “With your tongue.”

“My tongue?”

Like Thor summoned it, Loki’s own makes an appearance, rosy and slick, darting across Loki’s bottom lip to leave it gleaming. 

“Put it in my mouth. When you kiss me.”

Thor can feel his face scrunching up in that way that his tutor always says  _ isn’t princely _ . His knuckles ache with the phantom memory of a crane-rap. 

“Why?”

“Because that’s the way it’s done!” Loki huffs, arms crossing firmly over his chest. “You want it to count, don’t you?”

At which point Thor feels compelled to point out, “How would you know how it’s done?”

“I’ve seen it,” Loki retorts, lifting his nose in a way that apparently  _ is _ princely because Loki never gets rapped across the knuckles, no matter how much that look makes Thor want to shove him down a hill. “The servants sneak off and do all sorts of things, if you know where to look.”

An unexpected revelation. Lots of interesting things happen at court, but Mother always seems to send Thor and Loki to bed before the really exciting ones like duels and bawdy songs. What could the servants be doing that’s so good they can’t even do it at court? Surely kissing can’t be as special as all that. 

“What sorts of things?” he asks, suddenly intrigued. 

Loki is still perched with his nose in the air, but his eyes slink in Thor’s direction. “Do it properly and I’ll take you with me next time.”

And really, how can Thor respond to that other than to lean back into Loki’s space and press his mouth up against him again? For a moment it’s just as before, their skin dragging just a bit more with both of their lips slightly damp. Then Loki’s mouth slips open just a sliver, and Thor’s pressing his tongue in before he can think too much about it, and then he is possessed of the truly strange knowledge of what the inside of Loki’s mouth tastes like. It’s… clean, he supposes; a bit like cool water and a bit like metal; it makes him think about people calling Loki silver-tongued, which in turn makes him want to laugh. Only Loki’s tongue - silver or otherwise - is moving against Thor’s and it’s very wet, and very silky, and it makes Thor’s stomach sort of wriggle and his ribs feel hot underneath his skin. 

This unseemly gasping sound bursts out of his mouth when Loki pulls back from him, lips all red and eyes all black, and Thor feels like he’s sprinted all the way from the throne room, heart hammering and breath coming in ragged. 

He doesn’t even realize he’s lifted his hand until he sees his fingers hovering right at the edge of Loki’s mouth, a tiny white jag of electricity jumping from the tips of them to gleaming curve of Loki’s lips. It must hurt, at least a little - Thor doesn’t know what lightning feels like from the other side, but he’s shocked enough people on accident to know that no one likes it. Loki just grins against it, the angles of his face brilliant in the flash of star-blue light. 

***

The last of the day’s light glances off of the long, sleek surface of the mirror on Loki’s wall; catches like a fly in the spider’s web on the smooth gold skein of hair trailing down Loki’s back. It’s longer than Thor’s, and has more curl, the shade faintly cooler than in Thor’s own reflection; white gold to Thor’s yellow, moonlight to his sun.

The feel of it between his fingers is the same silk that Loki’s hair always is; soft and lovely enough to snare any maiden’s envy. 

Thor watches his own hand tuck a lock of spun gold behind Loki’s ear. They look more of a pair like this, though there’s still little enough about their faces that match. Loki has never favored either of their parents as obviously as Thor does; even less so as they age. His cheekbones have gone sharp as growth has stripped his body, honed it to a fine steel edge. Where Thor has broadened, Loki’s remained slender, lithe muscle lashed fast to bone. Woe betide anyone who mistakes that leanness for weakness

A slice of porcelain skin is carved out down the center of his tunic, nearly to the navel; the faint promise of strength made obscene by the onyx-green velvet covering every spare inch of him. Thor’s fingers itch to run across it, thick cloth and fragile skin, the jump of Loki’s pulse under his touch, but Loki’s mind is elsewhere at the moment and Thor doubts he would welcome the interruption. 

“The black suits you,” he says anyway, because it’s true and because Thor’s strength has never been his restraint.

To the best of his knowledge Loki is incapable of looking anything but lovely and forbidding, no matter what form he tries on, but there are bits that feel more true to him. Lately he’s been toying with lighter hair, thicker muscles. Barely a week past Thor had walked into his chamber to find Loki wearing a perfect copy of Thor’s own skin, flawless in all outward appearances and still inexplicably wrong. He’s almost certain that means something, but trying to work out Loki’s motivations has rarely ever ended well for him.

Loki hums distractedly, pulling the mass of hair over his shoulder to spill across his chest like a pearl waterfall.

His lips pull into a disconsolate mew, and then with a wave of his hand he’s back to raven-haired.

“I am no child of the light." His voice is barely a breath, the sort of low tone he tends toward when speaking for his own benefit. What comes after is meant for Thor, animated by the fox grin Loki shoots him in the mirror. “Asgard can only endure one golden prince.”

He runs his fingers lightly across the top of the vanity, baubles and scrolls and glittering gems shuffled under his touch. Carefully he extracts a short necklace of gold, wrought like the finest lace, securing it around his throat with deft fingers. 

“This seems like great deal of effort for a walk in the gardens,” Thors says, picking at a fold in Loki’s gnarled sheets. There’s a tome wedged between the foot and the mattress, something to do with Alfheim, but the dialect is too obscure for Thor to make out the proper title. 

“In the presence of poets, one must always strive to serve the muse,” Loki says loftily, eyes all for the gilt wire he’s busy magicking around the shell of his ear in the shape of twisting vines. 

Thor tosses the book into the center of the bed, leaning back against the foot of it to watch. 

“The only inspiration that letch is likely to find will occur below the waist.”

Loki waves a dismissive hand. “Go on then, disparage my choice of company. Though I’ll have you note that I never speak ill of your friends, questionable as they may be.”

“You and Kvasir are no friends.”

“My, my.” At this, at least, Loki turns to face Thor, a smile that would be more at home on a serpent curving his lips. “The mighty Thor, envious of a scholar. What will the Aesir think?”

“I am not envious.”

“No?” The way the word brushes against his skin raises the hairs on his arms, every teasing note in Loki’s voice like a predator in the underbrush.  

His fingers move with a thief’s ease along the catches of his tunic, fabric going slack around his waist, falling open over the hips. In the space between Thor’s throaty exhale and the moment he remembers how to breathe in again, the soft leather breeches Loki had on disappear entirely, along with whatever he was wearing underneath them. _ If _ he was wearing anything underneath them. 

“Then you wouldn’t want to leave some mark on me,” Loki says darkly. 

Thor was right, the black suits him; all the better when Loki shrugs first one shoulder then the other out of his soft velvet sleeves and leaves nothing but loose, inky waves to cover all of that creamy flesh.

“Some sign for anyone who might warm my bed to know they aren’t the first to touch my skin.” He’s stiflingly close now, and Thor can’t swear to which of them moved, only that they’re near enough for it to feel like Loki is sucking the very air from his lungs, sipping it from him like a fine wine. Thor’s skin itches with the urge to touch, words like a fever, roasting him in his skin. “That I could never belong to them.”

Thor hears the sound that trickles from between his own teeth like it belongs to something else; some cornered beast, wild and desperate. His hands are a vice on Loki’s hips; a matched set to Loki’s twisting in Thor’s hair.

“Down.” Loki’s voice is heavy and hot as hearthstone, weighing him until his knees kiss the floor. 

Heat pulses in his face, in his belly, coalescing between his legs until it nearly aches; a bastard mix of shame and need that means  _ Loki _ to him as surely as the echo of the great hall and the swirl of his mother’s skirts means  _ home _ . Blind, and deaf, and dumb and he would still know Loki just by this feeling rising in his bones, like magnet to lodestone, like the crackle of energy before a lightning strike. 

“My savage, greedy brother.” Loki’s voice is molten silk pouring down the back of his neck as he buries his face against fine, soft skin of Loki’s hip, just where it meets his thigh. “What shall we do with you?” 

Fingertips like ice chips brush the hair back from Thor’s face just as Thor sinks his teeth into the smooth stretch of muscle, demanding Thor’s gaze with nothing more than a suggestion and trapping it there wriggling on the hook of Loki’s blistering green eyes. 

He looks like he’s dying, or maybe just like death; like a fall from grace that Thor has been plunging down since the day he was born; like the only thing worth living for in the first place. Like love - vicious, and relentless, and all of the things that poets never bother to put in their flowery ballads because if their audience knew it could be like this it would set every warrior groping for their swords, every young lover running for their lives.

“Oh, it is a pity they want to make you king,” Loki hisses as the blood blooms hot, one thin-skinned layer from Thor’s tongue. “You look so perfect kneeling.”

***

Thor has always liked weddings. Asgard has never lacked for excuses to feast, but there is a particularly joyousness that comes with a marriage; unmarred by toasts to the fallen, no ragged edge from near misses or seizing the day because it could have been your last. 

Of course, there are also unique irritants to weddings, like the way it inspires every mother in the realm to send their daughters Thor’s direction as if they’ve only just realized he’s unwed. 

After four, or six, or Odin alone knows how many turns around the floor with this girl and that, Thor seizes a break in the music to make his escape to the balcony. Where the air in the hall is perfumed with roasted meats and scented oils, outside the breeze is sultry with the sweet musk of fig leaves, just enough light oozing past the press of bodies to turn the marble tiles into a faded battlefield of buttery firelight and the soft blue of the nearly-full moon. 

The tree branches creeping around the edges of the mezzanine are laden with glossy leaves, the silvery sounds of insects whispering from the shadows. Near the railing, the dark bulk of a horned owl swivels its gaze his direction, mirrored eyes and unnaturally black plumage. 

There is a pregnant moment where the night itself seems to pulse faintly and then Loki is unfolding himself from a dainty posture where the bird was sitting just an instant ago, a single ebony feather turning to hair between his fingers as he tucks it back.

“Shirking your duties, brother?” he smirks, leaning his elbows back against the railing. “What will the eligible toes of Asgard do without their prince to trod upon them?” 

Thor meanders over to where the overlook gives way to a view of the city and the waters beyond; a shimmering, liquid twin to the stars above. 

“To my recollection, they have two princes, and yet you have been conspicuous only in your absence.”

He regrets not stealing a tankard of ale before he slipped away, but the slither of the breeze across his sweat-stained neck is almost as good. 

“The fact that you’ve failed to notice me hardly means I have not been present.” 

Loki’s hair shines like satin in the light as he tosses the length of it again, falling in a glossy wave past his shoulders. Most of his hangs freely, but the left side up to the crown has been worked into small, elaborate braids, shot through with tiny golden cuffs and glittering green gems. 

“No one in the nine realms has ever overlooked you unless you wished it so,” Thor points out as Loki steps in close enough that Thor can smell the faint scent of woodsmoke and fresh flowers on his skin. Still not as close as he might like, given the stretch of Loki’s throat above the high, stiff collar of his tunic, the very front of it cut into a sinuous heart-shape that frames the soft divot between his collarbones. His ring-bedecked hands are the only other bit of exposed flesh, every last pale inch hidden away.

“S **á** ga is under the impression that I have relieved her of some transcripts from the negotiations on Niflheim,” Loki shrugs as if he expects Thor to follow a single thing he’s saying with Loki’s pulse fluttering there at the base of his throat like a barely-contained secret, and those kohl-rimmed eyes daring him to do something about it. 

Or, that might simply be wishful thinking. Loki is nothing if not circumspect about… matters. 

“Why would you want notes on the treaties of Niflheim?” Thor coaxes himself into asking after, perhaps, a bit too long. He can’t immediately think of anything more mindnumbing to peruse than the border-crossing bylaws, but Loki has always had an impressive tolerance for tedium. 

“Precisely the argument I have raised, and yet.”

“And yet you are hiding from an old woman.”

“Well, you seemed to be hiding from all of the young ones.” 

Just the faintest tone of bitterness flavors the words, but Thor knows him well enough to catch it. It isn’t that he doesn’t understand, in a way, why no one else seems to lay eyes on Loki and see what’s before them. Loki has guarded his secrets since before he had secrets to guard; cautious where Thor has always charged ahead, double-edged where Thor has always been blunt. 

In all honesty, Thor has never tried overmuch to correct the situation. Fandaral and Hogun and Volstagg are his friends, and because Loki is his brother they are often together, but if it weren’t for him, he doubts that the four would have anything to do with one another. In that way, Loki has always been more like Sif, though if anything the two of them are more contentious amongst themselves than either are with the others. 

A proper brother likely wouldn’t revel in the idea of being his little brother’s only true friend, but on the list of ways that Thor is not a proper brother, he rather doubts this ranks the highest. 

The truth is, Loki is the only secret Thor has ever managed to keep. It’s more than this matter between him that he has no language for – the closeness, he supposes, though that’s not quite right, not quite enough to encompass it all. The people, the court, his friends; they all see Loki, but only ever a version of him, a mask that Loki wears as effortlessly as his blades. Perhaps it’s that Loki can change himself, bend the light around his body, the very shape of himself to suit his needs, but Loki is never the same person with anyone else that he is with Thor. For Thor, perhaps. 

Loki must catch something in his expression, but gratefully misinterprets it. 

“I shouldn’t worry just yet,” he tosses a glance in the direction of the party. A small group has broken away, huddled off to the other side of the balcony, a bottle passing between them as readily as the laughter. Inside there is raucous conversation and the stamp of shod feet straining to keep pace with the tittering of pipes. “No one will make demands for your marriage until there is a crown on your head. And there have certainly been no worthy candidates presented thus far.”

Thor casts a look to the group across the way but none are near enough to overhear. Nonetheless, he finds his body turning in toward Loki, giving the others his back. 

“You hold a low opinion of the women of court,” he says lowly, an elbow knocking Loki’s thin wrist off of the railing. “I know you favor Sigyn.”

There’s been little enough speculation on the prospects of Thor’s marriage, which generally suits Thor just as well. He’s the heir, of course, and that comes with expectations. One day he’ll be required to make the right sort of match, laden her with a few strong, winsome progeny, but the idea of it seems vague and remote now, with the distant lights of houses and inns painting the night in slate and gold, the sounds of celebration like incense on the air, and his brother beside him, smiling that faint, indulgent smile that belongs entirely to Thor. 

Loki punches the meat of Thor’s arm off-handedly, a set of dainty, jeweled rings biting through the sleeve of his surcoat. 

“A fine enough girl,” Loki allows. “Thoughtful. But not built for the crown.”

“And Freyja?” Thor prods, passing a look to where the lady of her name stands, one arm curled indolently around  Óðr’s neck . Her dress looks to be of spun from diaphanous silks, fine enough to only just suggest the dark curve of a nipple and the lush contour of a hip. Ample excuse to steal any man’s breath and most women’s besides; there’s more than just cause for the gaggle of admirers gathered around her, and no one of any mind could deny it. 

“Obsessed with cats.” Loki sniffs, taking in the entire scene and dismissing it with a single flick of his lashes. “Honestly, brother, can you imagine any child she could bear that she would love more than that.”

Even as he speaks, the iron-grey feline draped over Freyja’s shoulder lifts its head to accept a morsel from her fingers; Freyja’s fine, straight nose nuzzled adoringly against its cheek as it gobbles the meat down.  Óðr stands alongside her, to all appearances entirely forgotten. 

Loki is... Not entirely wrong. 

Still, it rarely does to allow him his victories without some struggle. 

“Shall I prepare the sparring ring for when you inform Sif that she too is unworthy? ‘Tis a battle I’d care to see.”

Thor means it mostly to get a rise. In general he prefers Loki alive, which makes any statement to Sif out of the question, however entertaining it would be to watch the two of them battle to the hilt. Still, Loki hums deep in his throat, fingers twisting through the air for no apparent cause than his own pleasure.

“Had we another king, Sif would make an excellent queen, but for you?” Nothing has changed since the last time Thor looked toward the great hall, but the intensity of Loki’s stare that direction makes him take another glance just to check. “You need someone at your side to take an interest in the politics, someone who can negotiate with more than a sword’s edge.” 

His voice fades out to nearly nothing. Thor imagines that he’s made all of the grand pronouncements about Thor’s nature (or his failings, he supposes) that he means to, but then, like a ghost in some forgotten ruin, too formless to say for certain that it ever truly existed at all, “Someone who knows how to play the long game.” 

Like he’s had a brush with a spirit himself, the hairs rise along Thor’s spine, shivering amongst themselves all the way up to the crown of his skull.

There are moments, bare slivers of time, when its almost hard to believe that Loki is his brother and not some fairy creature, wild, and ethereal, and barely caged; a charge of pure power encased in gossamer skin, forever on the verge of splitting. In those moments, Thor can almost imagine what it would be like to fear him. 

Then again, fear has never been much in his nature. Far better, he’s always thought, to charge ahead and take on whatever’s bold enough to come running after. 

“You’ve a maid in mind?” he jests, jostling up against Loki’s near shoulder just to watch the irritable flinch of Loki’s brow. 

Gamely, Loki jostles back, slender form only just rocking Thor back on a heel. Still, there’s something alien lingering around the corners of his dark-limned eyes when he turns them fully on Thor; something forbidding, and perhaps a little too hungry for how it makes Thor sway closer. 

“I wouldn’t say that.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There has been a great deal said, over the years of Loki’s mercuriality, but in this one thing, Thor has never found his brother to be anything less than predictable.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is... just porn. Just 4k of 100% porn. Because I needed to finish at least part of this fic before Infinity War shows up to ruin my life.

On the best of his days, there is some small margin of chance that Thor could creep into Loki’s chamber in the middle of the night and catch Loki unawares. 

Thor rather doubts that this is one of his better days. 

Doubts it almost entirely when he gets halfway across the room and falls flat on his face. 

“If you have come to sing me The Ballad of The Ale-Conqueror again, I will throw you out of the window and Mother won’t even scold me for it.” Loki’s voice grumbles out the darkness, the growl of a predator from a cave. 

Ignoring that altogether, Thor stumbles to his feet. Thinks better of it when the sudden shift in elevation set his balance spiralling and crouches down again, feeling his way along the tiles. 

He doesn’t recall Loki’s bed being quite such a challenge before, he thinks, mountaineering his way up the frame until he can flop down on the mound of blankets Loki insists on sleeping with even in the depths of summer. 

“Abed so early, brother? You’ve aged before your years!”

“Considering the proximity to dawn, I’d question your authority on time.” The sudden swell of jade light makes Thor’s eyes spasm, revealing an annoyed, sumptuously rumpled Loki balancing a tiny node of raw seidr above his outstretched hand. “Ugh, you smell like a brothel fell into a vat of beer and  _ you are wearing boots on my bed _ !”

His free hand clutches like it itches for a knife but the screech of his voice is too near a match for the time they set loose a basket of frogs in the kitchen and sent all of the scullery maids squealing up onto the tables for Thor to do anything but laugh. 

Loki snarls, rising from the tangle of linens like a nokken from the water; smooth, bare skin all the way down. 

“Out! Get out, you worthless oaf!” His fingers are iron tightening around Thor’s arm, shoving and skidding him half off the bed before Thor manages to wrap an arm around Loki’s waist.

All that succeeds in is to throw Loki forward, so instead of crashing to the floor alone Thor does it with a writhing, furious sack of elbows and knees on top of him.

The sudden impact of one turns his guffaw into a wheeze. Or perhaps that’s the cold, slim hand pressing down on his throat. 

“I will end you, you absolute lout,” Loki hisses, fingers tightening around the sides of Thor’s neck. His eyes are glittering black pools of murder, which might be a bit more intimidating if it weren’t for his hair twisting in ten different directions, shot through with wan green in the light of the orb hovering just above his head. “And all the nine realms shall sing my praises for ridding them of the fool who would be king.” 

“Brother.” Thor’s voice comes free a rasp, barely enough air to get the words out through his grin. “Brother, I had a fine night tonight. Won’t you ask me about it?”

Loki’s expression is lemon-sour, but he eases back enough on his grip for Thor to suck in a shaky breath. Of course, he also settles his naked ass back to rest over Thor’s hips, nothing but the thin layer of Thor’s breeches separating them, and that poses an entirely new quandary for Thor’s breathing. 

“What’s to ask? You’ve prepared for your coronation by getting into your cups with the warriors three. Had a brawl, perhaps.” He flicks distastefully at an errant fold of Thor’s cape. “In a pigsty by the look of it.”

Skin prickling with the weight of Loki’s stare, Thor laughs again, easy with the swirl of drink in his belly and the sizzling curl of want that’s been tucked neatly at the base of his spine for hours. 

“Yes, brother. And then I met a woman.” 

There’s no way Loki has missed the way Thor’s pulse is racing under his fingers, or the simmering heat resolving in the pan of his hips to press up against Loki, yet still he sniffs, unimpressed, as if the spread of his thighs around Thor hasn’t offered more than enough evidence to give him away.

“You’ve met hundreds, no doubt.”

Shrugging is as good an excuse as any for Thor to let his body roll as it wants to, the filthy lurch of his gut when Loki rides it is still as sweet and sharp as the first time he ever watched his brother move over him. He doesn’t bother trying to disguise his moan. 

“She was beautiful. Long, dark hair. And her breasts! Brother, her breasts!”

He thrusts up again, enough force this time that Loki has to catch himself with both hands on Thor’s chest, the side of his nose twitching like a snarling dog. 

“Charming. I take it you took this siren and her mammaries to your bed.”

“No,” Thor grins. “I took her to  _ her _ bed.”

“Indeed? To tuck her in?”

Loki’s cock is right there, nearly hard, and lovely enough to make Thor’s whole body throb. He could take him in hand now, stroke and twist in just the way that Loki prefers, and Loki might well moan for him; arch his spine and cry out and spend across Thor’s front, biting at his lips. Or he might swat Thor’s hand away and crawl back into bed and not a thing Thor could say or do would earn him any satisfaction. 

It’s always a game with Loki, even when it’s one they both stand to win. 

“To give her pleasure the likes of which she had never yet known.”

Thor settles for kneading his palm against the fine stretch of Loki’s thigh, instead. Tiny muscles twitch against his fingers, nearly shaking with the tension that’s entirely absent from Loki’s dispassionate face. 

“A shame to leave so fair a maiden disappointed.”

The faint scratch of Thor’s nails against delicate skin and short, wiry hair garners him a whisper of an indrawn breath and the jump of Loki’s cock swaying between them. 

“I have never disappointed a lover.”

“No?” Loki asks, gratifyingly husky.  

The pressure against his chest increases as Loki dips in close, the soft gust of his breath against Thor’s lips like the scent of water to a man dying of thirst. “Show me how you kissed her.”

His mouth is already watering for it, but Thor (just barely) keeps himself reigned in, forces the press of his lips against Loki’s to be tender, slow like they practically never are with each other. It’s almost,  _ almost, _ like kissing someone else entirely; someone pliant and warm and just a little bit careless of the way his teeth catch at Thor’s bottom lip, tugging softly and pointedly not digging in. The strangeness of it sets Thor’s nerves jangling, skin itching for the sharp bite of pain that would make this feel more familiar, more real. But then, real isn’t what this is about. 

A velvety, pleased sound pours out of Loki, pooling at the corners of Thor’s lips, slipping mead-sweet down the back of his throat. The light turns the sweep of his tongue vaguely monstrous, eyes glittering like black opal behind the lazy slit of his lids. Thor rather doubts that the crackling cobweb of heat the sight wakes under his skin is an appropriate reaction. 

“And then?”

“And then I applied myself to her other virtues.”

Thor has been called any number of things in his years, shameless not least among them. He certainly has no compunction about undulating his body, Loki’s weight shifting for an instant of perfect friction against his clothed cock, chest pressing up into the cup of Loki’s palms. Compensating for the shift, Loki’s fingers tighten, dark-tipped nails pressing dull points of pressure into Thor’s skin through his jerkin. 

And then not through his jerkin. 

He’s lived nearly all his life in the weave of Loki’s magic, nestled in it alongside him like two squawking hatchlings. More than long enough to know the whisper of it against his nerves. It caresses through him like a draft slithering through his marrow and then his clothes are no longer wrapped around him but tucked instead beneath his body for a thin, lumpy mattress. All except the boots, which are still pointedly scraping mudstains into Loki’s floor as Thor flexes his legs to feel the barely-there give of his brother’s flesh sliding silky against him. 

Another time, another way, he’d expect the hot drag of Loki’s nails over his chest, raising long scarlet welts that Loki would follow with the sweep of his tongue, burning them like a brand into Thor’s flesh. His bones jitter with craving for it at the same time that Loki’s thumbs, skating gently over his nipples, waken something soft-edged and simmering and entirely different in his belly. 

“So low-minded is he, Asgard’s forthcoming king,” Loki murmurs, mouth curving upward even as his head dips low, a flash of cruel teeth that has nothing to do with the tongue that curls slippery against Thor’s nipple.

Pleasure rushes backward along Thor’s veins, ruffling his bloodstream with a honeyed burn that settles into his limbs like lead, a heavy haziness that jangles, misshapen, against the urgency that blooms in him with every satin rasp of Loki’s lips. He mounds the muscle of Thor’s chest in one hand, pressing a sucking kiss to the artificial curve of it as nimble fingers continue their work flaying Thor’s nerves raw. 

“Who do you suppose enjoys this more, hmm?” Loki muses, the tip of his tongue tracing a path up Thor’s sternum. Indolent, to all appearances, except for the new trail of slick he leaves cooling on Thor’s belly every time Loki rocks his hips against him. “You or your barmaid?”

Thor would answer (he’s not entirely certain how, but he’s sure that he would) only Loki chooses that particular moment to gnash his teeth over the reddening nub of Thor’s nipple, only just shy of splitting  the skin. The sound that flies from Thor’s gaping mouth might well be loud enough to raise the guards if Loki hadn’t long ago placed dampening wards on his chambers for precisely such occasions. 

“You left her hot. Tender,” Loki all but purrs, knuckles catching at Thor’s abused flesh and kneading. “Knowing she’ll have no choice but to think of you tomorrow with every chafe of cloth, every tiny pain a memory of pleasure.”

It’s a struggle to do more than breathe. Each inhale dragging his skin against Loki’s, each exhale breeding a tug of fingers, the sting like a needle that melts into his muscle, into his bones, steeps him in a shocky, razor-edged bliss that makes his cock jump, trapped between them by just enough of Loki’s weight to be maddening. 

“Yes,” Thor gasps. His mind is alight with the image of his own coronation regalia, tried and fitted for the final time just yesterday afternoon - the midnight blue linen shirt and the crimson kirtle over it, a barrier against his armor but also a pressure against his skin, finely-woven and supple, but not so much that he can hope to avoid awareness of it against abraded flesh with every breath and bow.

It’s enough to inspire his hips to lift, trying for an extra modicum of friction to ignite this simmering desire into something wilder and more endurable. Loki, of course, refuses to allow it. Instead, he slips his own legs from around Thor’s hips and slithers between them, his cock lining up against Thor’s in an uncoordinated bump. 

“Was she desperate, brother?,” Loki smears into Thor’s skin, breath huffing with the first palpable sign of his need. “Did her body plead for you like a hind in season?” 

His touch against Thor’s stomach is unnaturally slick, cool patterns left in the wake of his traipsing fingers as they outline the cut of his hips, the tender, delicate stretch where thigh becomes groin. Like firebird feathers dusting against his skin, flickering and burning with every touch. The wad of clothing sparing Thor’s back from the marble scrunches with his restless shifting, a constellation of breath-stealing chill creeping across his bare skin.

“Loki,” hisses between Thor’s teeth as Loki’s fingers lick across the fragile acreage of his balls and lower, so light it might well only be a thought, pressing against Thor’s hole.

“Did you fuck her?”

The slippery strain of fingertips pet a come-hither gesture against him that sets Thor’s guts obediently squirming. A drop of whatever enchanted fluid Loki favors tickles along his crease, smudged away just as quick by his brother’s skidding touch when Thor tries to still his hips and fails soundly in the effort. 

Ice-hot frustration shatters like a glass bauble in Thor’s chest, prickling shards that stick into the meat of him, crunch with the surge of motion as he grabs at Loki’s hair, twists their faces close enough for breathing to bite out an urgent, “Yes!”

Loki’s fingers are inside of him almost before he can make out the syllable, vicious sting eddying into a thick, decadent ache. Two, perhaps even three, sloppy wet with another dose of Loki’s spellwork; as close to an admission as he’s likely to get that Loki is subject to this same hectic, spine-gnawing desire.

Loki mumbles something that Thor can’t quite make out over the pounding of his own heart in his ears as he rolls himself into the push of Loki’s hand, forgetting all about the awkward bunch of fabric under him and his bootheels knocking against the floor and the face-heating squelch of fluid that his brother is fucking into him in favor of the way Loki’s greedy gaze flutters over him, snagging here and there as the play of the light catches on some particular bit of interest before flitting off to another and another, feasting on the sight of him like a starved thing. 

As if he hasn’t been claw-deep in Thor’s heart for all of their lives. 

There’s nothing for Thor’s grasping hands to cling to, skidding useless across the tile, grout coming away under his nails when Loki’s fingers curl mercilessly inside of him, making space. Jittery pleasure cascades through Thor’s system, dripping and spreading and filling in the empty places like hot candle wax. Loki’s fingers draw out again slowly; strong, capable, hilt-calloused fingers drawing circles around his hole, pressing in again to toy with the very rim. 

“When you take your place upon that throne,” Loki says, thumb coming up to massage at the stretch of flesh behind Thor’s balls. “It will be gingerly, to the memory of my cock in your ass.”

Right on the edge of well and truly breathless, Thor still manages to choke out, “Then you shall have to give it to me with more conviction than this.”

He cannot claim that he has always made good decisions. 

The sound of Loki’s knuckles slapping against Thor’s flesh as he shoves his fingers into him with enough force to skid Thor several inches across the floor seems to bounce off of the buttresses like the ringing of a bell. Lost, in an instant by the noises that come pouring unbidden out of Thor’s mouth. 

He cannot claim that he has always made bad decisions either. 

Breathing harshly, he lifts his hips into the next push, rides the motion of Loki’s arm back down as his brother rises up over him, Loki’s bottom lip gone white between his own teeth, chest heaving with effort or want or some strange concoction of both. Skirting the border where bliss and pain fuse and still not quite enough. 

“It’s no wonder-” Thor breaks off gasping as Loki’s fingers crush mercilessly against that deep knot of pleasure inside of him. “No wonder that it is I who will be king-” He tenses, drawing a hungry, snarling noise that is neither entirely aesir nor animal from Loki’s mouth. “If you don’t even know what to do with your cock, brother.”

There has been a great deal said, over the years of Loki’s mercuriality, but in this one thing, Thor has never found his brother to be anything less than predictable. Cat-vicious, Loki’s teeth sink hard into the meat above Thor’s bent knee, fingers drawing most of the way free and cupping, like a guide leading the blunt tip of his cock into the clutch of Thor’s body. 

A long, thready whine leaks out of Thor’s throat as the tight, gritty pressure of it keeps going, and going, heady lust weighing down his eyelids until he’s staring at his brother’s tortured, longing face through his lashes. 

Loki shivers all around him, a ripple of pure satisfaction tucked right up against Thor’s skin. His hair hangs down around his face, one hank of it pasted to his forehead like a veil behind which his pupils twitch fitfully, round to snake-slit. Muscle jumps under Thor’s touch as he tightens his legs around Loki’s waist just as Loki begins to thrust in earnest.

The tempo is punishing, slightly off-kilter to match the ragged rhythm of Loki’s breathing. Skin squeals against marble, every fuck of Loki’s hips a hot-cold burn, and if Thor’s nipples will ache beneath his armor tomorrow then Loki’s knees will be black-and-blue when he kneels before Thor’s throne. It’s a thought that Thor had not anticipated he would find so alluring, yet there is his neglected cock, all but leaping from the puddle of his own leaked slick at the idea. 

“Arrogant, bull-headed, selfish brute,” Loki growls into Thor’s mouth. The fact that neither of them are coordinated enough for it at the moment is only part of the reason it’s not a kiss. Thor drinks the words like nectar off of Loki’s tongue, lets them zip like deranged fireflies all through his belly, simmering trails fizzing in their wake every time Loki buries himself deep. 

Not quite a sonnet, he supposes, but the same in Loki’s way. 

“You love me more than anyone,” he grins, flinging a hand up to bat away the footstool that they’ve managed to inch their way to. 

Smooth, perfect teeth nip hard at him, knocking against his own, catching at the curve of his cheek, the wing of his jaw. “I hate everyone, and you most of all. You-” 

Beneath Thor’s grasping hands, Loki’s back trembles, hips bucking harder as if to make up for the lapse. “You-” Loki huffs again, a narrow furrow dug between his brows, eyes morphing green-blue-gold under the glassy sheen of carnality. 

They have fucked a thousand times, a hundred thousand, and in all of the ways that they have had each other, the strange, brazen, craven things they have tested between them with only their impulses and exotic gossip for guides, there has never been one that Thor has found more satisfying than turning his brilliant, viper-tongued little brother into a clod-brained mess with nothing his own body and Loki’s want of it. 

“The woman,” Thor pants, allowing his voice to be as rough and wanton as it cares to against the curl of Loki’s ear. “I spilled inside of her. Even yet she must drip with my spend.”

He’s not prepared for the sudden score of nails at his shoulder, nor the hasty startle of breath that Loki sucks in, lifting Thor by the hips and rising up on his knees as if he means to fold Thor in two using only his cock. All of the air gushes out of Thor’s chest on a lewd moan at the weight of his own legs and the strength of Loki fucking the living sense out of him, nervous center breaking into a standing ovation and a few rousing choruses of Loki’s name. 

“Norns, Thor,” is hardly a sound, hardly a gust of air against his collarbone, and then there is nothing but the stunned, stifled sound of Loki sobbing out his finish and the perfect, filthy flex of cock buried deep inside like a slice of pleasure straight to Thor’s core. 

It takes a few moments of slow, disjointed gasping before Loki finally lifts his head, eyes gone vivid, blood-stained scarlet behind the droop of his lids. Heart slamming against his ribs, Thor tries to keep steady through, struggling not to wriggle with the feel of Loki, not yet soft and silky-wet where he shifts along Thor’s tender insides. It makes Thor want to chew at his fingernails like he hasn’t since he was little - overwhelming and sweet and terrible, mostly because of how it reminds Thor of his own dick dripping an amber-thick trail down the center of his abdomen. 

There’s no chance for it to do more than flex in the sex-drenched sliver of space between them before Loki’s captured it; soothing hands stroking down the shaft and sliding back the foreskin, circling the tip with clever, dexterous fingers. Glossy, they lift to Loki’s bitten-pink lips, the tip of his tongue darting out for a delicate taste that tugs another swell of precome from Thor with gut-clenching urgency. 

Color high in his cheeks and sweat glinting like daybreak-frost from the crest of his shoulders, Loki looks nothing at all like the cool, removed prince who has, on at least three occasions, reduced the apothecary to tears over the quality of his wormwood stock. The sound of him, however, remains very much the same; the lofty, disinterested drawl that never fails to inspire Thor to do something inadvisable.

“I assume you remembered...” 

His firm, relentless grip sends little flashes of starlight bursting behind Thor’s eyelids, plays havoc with all of the parts of his mind that help him keep track of insignificant things like words. 

“Your potion,” Thor chokes out obediently, tongue gone to lead, mouth flooded at the glittering thrill of one dark fingernail grazing his slit. “Of course.”

This close, the two of them make up their own world; the smell of overworked bodies and the perfumed oil Loki wears in his hair; the twin spike of their pulses, pressed so tight together that they’re reverberating in time; the sleek, insinuating ecstacy pouring in on him like water from the depths, drowning everything else. 

“The last thing that Asgard needs is a bastard heir from some buxom barmaid at The Green Jester.”

“It was the-” Thor’s voice falls to pieces halfway there, collapsing in on itself as the fog in Thor’s head flares white when Loki’s fingers tighten just so, pull just right-wrong-perfect. 

_ Yes _ . 

Stripped bare by the tingling buzz, Thor floats, dizzier than drink has ever made him. Loki says that it’s the seidr - that Thor would know if he ever bothered to bed anyone with a scrap of magical talent - but Thor’s always rather fancied that it’s the blood between them singing in harmony. 

“The Pixie & Swan,” he sighs, at length, arching his arms in a shaking stretch that’s slightly impeded by how close they’ve come to ramming headlong into the wall. 

Settled back on his heels, Loki lifts an unimpressed eyebrow. The effect is spoiled somewhat by the smug curve of his lips and the sleek stripes of Thor’s come glittering down his middle like obscene jewels. 

The sight sends another jolt of possessive satisfaction slinking under Thor’s skin, his cock letting loose one more feeble twitch. The tips of Loki’s fingers graze an affectionate stroke down it until it settles again. 

Leaning back in a way that might almost pass as unintentional if it weren’t for how perfectly it causes the light still floating above their heads to spill across his chest, Loki pats at Thor’s thigh like a prized steed and smirks, “Truly, you are moving up the world.” 


End file.
